Our Favorite Games of 2022


2022 is in the books!

The past year marked our first full one after pandemic-related closures and challenges, and it’s been lovely returning to full levels of (mostly) normalcy. We’ve expanded our craft beer selection, and sample every brew liberally to make sure we have a wide variety of quality options. It’s a difficult job, but we suffer for your pleasure. We’ve slowly continued progress on our successful Kickstarter of Heckin’ Hounds, a parlor-published trick taking game currently being manufactured overseas. We’re tastefully late on fulfillment, but honestly that’s par for the course with any crowdfunding campaign - we respect traditions.

We thought it would be fun to share what particular games caught our attention and left a lasting impression on us this year. As with our prior “Favorite” lists, this won’t be a collection of games that exclusively came out in 2022, though some will have. It will be focused on things that happened to cross our paths this year regardless of when they actually released - so “new to us.” Here are a handful of games we particularly enjoyed!

PART I : JAMES

Light Strategy Games

Splendor Duel (2022)

Splendor Duel was probably the biggest surprise among my light strategy experiences in 2022. Of all the games to make a two player thematic cousin for, Splendor (2014) would have been exceptionally low on my list. Maybe the unexpected nature helped make it even more of a pleasant surprise, but so far Splendor Duel is a casual two-player experience that (at least for me) surpasses the game it was modeled after in a way I’ve not seen since 7 Wonders Duel (2015).

Many core elements of Splendor remain the same - you build a no-frills engine of gem generation, acquiring rare jewels that themselves help pay for even more rare jewels leading to a win condition. What makes Splendor Duel even more fun than its older cousin are a few twists, the first of them being multiple win conditions. No longer is it necessarily a straight point race; doubling down on a single gem type, or acquiring enough crowns, provide additional paths to victory.

The biggest thing Splendor had going for it were the viscerally pleasant, tactile nature of the chips, and Splendor Duel satisfies this with some cute lil’ chips of its own. Rather than simply acquiring the colors you want with (nearly) no restriction a la Splendor, Duel requires you to consider the most advantageous row of three gems. This opens up more obvious methods of ‘hate drafting’ resources from your opponent - the gems you take have to be uninterrupted rows that don’t contain a gold token, and you can definitely be the combative jeweler that leaves nothing but gaps and gold.

One of my favorite themes in two-player games is the tension in who pulls the trigger first on opening up further opportunities for both players. This is evident in 7 Wonders Duel by how you choose to move up a tree of cards, eventually forced to take cards that unlock access to higher cards further up the tree for your opponent. Splendor Duel offers a similar experience in who pulls the trigger on resetting the board, which resets drafting opportunities for both players and hands the opponent a token called ‘privilege,’ granting them…well. Privileges.

There’s additional small nuances to Splendor Duel that make it a very enjoyable two player experience, but ultimately it’s the added depth and tension packed into a tiny, quick game that surpasses its inspiration, and makes it one of my favorite light two-player reimaginings on par with 7 Wonders Duel.

Canvas (2021)

Canvas is really pretty, really light, and hangs on a wall. Enough said, moving on.

Fine, I’ll say a bit more. If a game like Splendor Duel is packing as much strategic depth into a casual experience as it can, Canvas is gunning to be as approachable a gateway experience as possible with stunning table presence and a dash of personal creativity.

The game itself involves assembling three paintings to score as many points as possible among scoring goals that differ game to game. Mostly transparent cards are drafted from a shared row, with artistic features on each allowing a combination of elements to make a unique painting. For instance, one card may feature an anchor, the next a birdcage, and the last a crumbling lighthouse, all coming together to form a unique painting containing all of those elements (plus a really cool name combining words from your cards). The strategy comes in layering your cards, covering certain symbols and allowing certain symbols at the bottom to be visible in a way that optimizes your points to match the goals.

The pull of Canvas is, without a doubt, the components and the table presence. Drafted cards are dealt onto a beautiful cloth playmat, and the transparent cards themselves are a rarely utilized feature in board games perfectly suited for the theme of assembling a unique piece of art. Canvas’ mechanics are unassuming and simple, perfect for bringing to the table among nongamers.

Games like Canvas are important to our hobby. Rules-light gateway games bridge the distance between dedicated gamers and those easily intimidated by dense rules and strategic complexity. For anyone with a friend or family member who views tabletop gaming as pushing soldiers across a map, Canvas is the perfect game to pull off the shelf (or the wall), offering a relaxing experience of casual card drafting alongside a few strokes of artistic self expression.

Cascadia (2021)

I’ve come to realize most abstract strategy games hit a space where I wish I enjoyed them more. Not quite fully casual, not quite serious strategy, and often a very beautiful theme that is completely irrelevant and interchangeable. I absolutely respect these games, and fully understand why people enjoy them. They just won’t often be my first choice.

Cascadia resounds with me though, and even though I’ve thought about it I can’t quite put my thumb on why. Maybe it’s that the mix of theme and mechanics match just a smidge more than most other games in the abstract strategy field. The game involves laying terrain tiles and placing wildlife tokens in a manner fitting the ecological needs of the animals (and the scoring needs of the animal playing the game), and for the most part these tiles and token placements make some sense. Salmon like water, and enjoy swimming in lines reminiscent of a National Geographic stream scene. Bears operate in small isolated family groups or only in pairs. Elk…really like standing in circles…. Alright maybe they don’t all fit perfectly, but it’s solid enough for abstract strategy and good enough for my brain.

Maybe it’s the double-tactile nature of the game; anything that tickles the base of my brainstem with components already has an advantage with me. Why only place tiles, or fetch cute little wooden animal disks out of a bag, when I can do both?

Maybe it’s just because bears are my favorite animal. By a highland mile.

Most likely it’s a mix of all of it. A beautiful, natural theme aligns with just enough mechanical congruence to feel a shade more on point than other abstract games, while still keeping the relaxing, laid-back nature of those puzzles. Cascadia was a pleasant surprise for me in 2022. 

Card Games

Magic: the Gathering; Pauper Commander (1993 / 2003ish)

Magic: the Gathering has had an undercurrent of simmering tension threatening to boil over for a few years. There’s been growing sentiment among players that the pace of releases has gotten too aggressive, and the glut of different products available within each release confusing. Years ago a booster pack meant a booster pack - now you need to specify which of about five different kinds of booster packs you’re referring to.

2022 saw this sentiment expressed in financial terms in multiple ways. First, with the backlash from the community of a thousand dollar 30th anniversary pack of cards, a head-scratching choice to celebrate three decades of Magic with the community by making certain only the deepest of wallets in that community willing to pay an absurd price tag for unplayable proxies could join in. Second, a double downgrade of Hasbro stock by Bank of America from “Buy” to “Underperform,” with a report specifically referencing Hasbro’s relentless wringing of MtG players’ wallets potentially approaching a breaking point.

It’s probably clear by my tone I largely agree with the disenchantment. So why is Magic: the Gathering on my list?

Because screw the expensive cards, let’s play in the pile of garbage.


If you’re not familiar with Commander, it has your deck identified by a single card (your Commander), and a deck of 99 additional cards in a singleton format - only one copy of each. The lack of guaranteed consistency has the format lean somewhat more casual, though you can certainly spend thousands of dollars to squeeze consistency and efficiency out of your unwieldy pile of cards.

That’s where the pauper element comes in. Your commander has to be an uncommon, and that pile of 99 cards can only be commons. The vast majority of common cards can be purchased (if you don’t have them lying around in a shoebox already) for less than ten cents. It’s extremely cheap to build a good, functional pauper commander deck. 

Setting aside costs, there’s additional reasons I love the format. Your commander forced to be an uncommon unlocks a massive amount of options and considerations. This is largely anecdotal, but in browsing uncommons the abilities are often…just weird. In a really good way. I often come across uncommons and I have no idea if they would be amazing or terrible as a commander, but for a relatively cheap price tag I’m willing to find out. The power value of rares upward is often evident on the face of the cards, but thumbing through uncommons more and more I feel like sometimes a card is assigned uncommon when a group of designers look at a card, and agree that the ability is interesting, but can’t strictly tell if it’s good or not.

Another reason is the descaled power level, or what I’ve always referred to as scrappiness, in a card game. Some of my personal, most fun moments in card gaming aren’t when I’ve honed a deck to maximum efficiency for tournament play, but in the early stages of a budding game and card pool where you’re forced to play with objectively inefficient cards. Scrappiness is less explosive, often having to make seemingly suboptimal choices for lack of a stronger alternative. Scrappiness is fighting with the broken leg of a barstool instead of a rapier. The pauper format captures a few elements of this scrappiness.

Pauper Commander strips the player of their status as an all-powerful planeswalking wizard and throws them in the mud to fight outside tavern. And I love it.

Marvel Champions (2019)

Marvel Champions was released in 2019, and although I played a bit, I didn’t add it to the list of my favorite experiences that year. It was certainly a good game, and I felt it fit a good niche among the Fantasy Flight cooperative LCGs as being a more casual experience than the Lord of the Rings (2011) or Arkham Horror (2016) card games, but at the time I preferred the depth and complexity of those experiences.

For those that may not be aware, Marvel Champions is a cooperative game that has players (or a player - it’s a notably good solo game) take on the role of iconic Marvel characters battling against classic villains and the machinations they scheme up. This is done on two fronts - the classic pow and wham of punching a bad guy, and also using your brains to thwart the background scheming going on. You slowly build yourself up with techniques, allies, support, weapons, or armor, to take on the increasingly stronger villains and dire situations a scenario heaps on you.

In the past year a father and son I’m friends with asked me to join in their campaigns, and we’ve been playing semi-regularly for about half a year now. Now I’m having an absolute blast. I’ve played a number of heroes, but most recently Colossus and Wolverine. Admittedly a large part of my enjoyment comes from the people I’m playing with, not just from loving their company, but also leaning on their expertise with the game in managing tokens and offering advice. Even deckbuilding has been consolidated to a few choices for my benefit. As much as I love the complexity of assembling a deck, when you play quite a few card games sometimes it’s nice to have a few experiences on rails so you can hop directly into the action.

As I type this I’m scheduling our second attempt at Magneto, the final boss in the Mutant Genesis Campaign Expansion (we’ve dubbed our first botched attempt a Danger Room Simulation). Perhaps some of my increased enjoyment of Marvel Champions three years after release comes with the increasing nuance and cleverness of the scenarios themselves, but I suspect it has just as much to do with my desire for a slightly less complicated LCG experience, and my enjoyment of the people I’m playing with.

Summoner Wars : Second Edition (2021)

I already praised Summoner Wars to Itharia and back a year ago, and if you want to see my full thoughts you can find them here: https://sapphirecitygames.com/end-of-2021.

The expandable nature of the game, and the fact that I played factions that released in 2022 (Fungal Dwarves are SO COOL), means I have a loophole to once again state you should play this game.

Now that Fantasy Flight Games appears to have exited the competitive LCG space, Summoner Wars is the uncontested best two-player strategy card game on the market. It has constant releases by a company that adores the game and their players. If you’re near the Parlor, they are also local (Plaid Hat Games is located in Ashland, Ohio), which means you have the added benefit of patting yourself on the back for supporting a local(ish) small business.

It’s an exceptionally fun time, capturing depth of strategy without the financial trappings of a lifestyle game, and you should try it.

Medium Strategy Games

Wonderland’s War (2022)

Druid City Games, the publisher behind Wonderland’s War, has made a name for themselves with their visually striking games. The first that came on my radar from them was The Grimm Forest (2018), a light family game with delightful table presence and a handful of beautiful fairy tale inspired miniatures. Wonderland’s War continues this trend of phenomenally well-produced games, but with a deeper layer of strategy pushing it into mid-weight territory.

In Wonderland’s War, players are vying for control of Wonderland’s various territories scattered across the board. The game is split into two key phases - the Tea Party, and the War. The Tea Party has players rotate around a set table of tea and cards, drafting allies for use in the battle to come and dropping their associated chips into your bag, claiming powerful Wonderlandians for special effects, or a number of other benefits such as reducing your madness (negative chips present in your bag), pursuing quests, and so on.

After the tea-drinking drafting phase war breaks out across Wonderland, with each region resolving fights based on their power present, and a little luck drawn from their bag until someone folds or goes mad (busts after drawing too many negative tokens). Players not associated in a particular territory's battle observe from afar, drinking tea and placing wagers on who the victor will be.

This is a very simplified description of the game, but essentially it’s a bifurcated experience split between two equally important phases of drafting, and push-your-luck area control combat. Wonderland’s War was not on my radar during the Kickstarter or initially on release - in reviewing the rules, the connection between the two phases seemed just fiddly enough to leave me uninterested. 

It’s probably worth pausing to explain that better. Fiddly is a bit of a controversial term in gaming, and everyone has a different definition for it. Mine involves games where complexity or lack of intuitiveness in the rules doesn’t align with the weight of the game. For me, fiddly is when you’re constantly consulting rules clarifications for a game that’s intended to last less than an hour. I’m more willing to forgive nuanced rulesets or complex interactions that don’t appear seamless at first glance when the game is intended to be an epic-scaled affair - often the reason for these seemingly less intuitive rules will become apparent an hour or two into the gameplay - but if the game is going to end in a half hour it may not have felt worth the journey.

It took me a few months after release to finally break down and give it a shot, as positive buzz continued to build. Clearly my first impression was wrong. There’s certainly more going on than some other games of similar weight (and perhaps it’s skirting the edge my aethereal and completely made up ‘fiddly’ term), but like the Mad Hatter it manages to contain its own madness, and perhaps be even more charming for having it in the first place. 

Each character has an asymmetric playstyle fitting their theme - the Queen of Hearts leans mercilessly into combat, the Mad Hatter takes the typically negative ‘madness’ effect and wields it as an advantage, and so on. There’s plenty of opportunity to solidify your presence in various territories, between your character’s strength and the castles they’ve erected, but ultimately many battles will come down to how well you’ve managed (and can push) your luck when it comes time to pull tokens from your bag. When you sit at the table to a bag-builder you know what you’re getting into, and something about this added level of managing luck just fits with the theme, without feeling like you’re being punished with too much randomness.

Wonderland’s War was a very pleasant surprise, subverting my initially less-than-stellar expectations. It’s a beast to set up and tear down, but you’re rewarded with an absolutely stunning game dripping with theme and just the right amount of intricacy, without overstaying its welcome.

Heavy Strategy Games

Carnegie (2022)

It’s only recently that games simulating economic expansion and industry building have grown on me more and more. It’s not that number crunching and efficiency squeezing bothered me, I just needed these elements to be hidden behind a curtain of compelling theme - a fantasy war or a budding space empire, even Mediterranean trading added a layer of thematic interest that could trick me into doing math. But there’s something about the industrial era that lends itself very well to this style of game - a period defined by aggressive expansion and relentless economic development - but was simultaneously a little boring for me.

Brass: Birmingham (2017), an exceptionally good game of relentless economic development, marks my more solidified interest in this style and theme, and Carnegie continues to build on it, further converting me into a 19th century number-cruncher.

Carnegie has a fair few moving parts, but essentially you’re building and managing a company - your personal player board comprising different departments. You’ll be adding additional departments to your board that grant different benefits. While building up your fledging economic empire, you’re also keeping an eye for opportunity across the United States. Deploying workers to various different sections of the country will grant resource benefits when triggered, and taking over different finance and industry projects in major cities, while advancing different philanthropic goals in true “gospel of wealth” fashion,  solidify your control towards end-game scoring. Your ability to take advantage of these opportunities is tied in with how well you research and develop, a clever little addition to your personal player board. The gear-wheel tracks are slid into a section of your double-layered board at game setup, slowly sliding outward to offer additional opportunities the more you invest in research and development.

How you ‘trigger’ these resource benefits, and really accomplish much of anything, is probably my favorite part of the game. I have a soft spot for action selection, a mechanic in games such as Race for the Galaxy (2007) and more recently my favorite addition to Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition (2021), where players have to choose what phases or actions will take place in a given round. In Carnegie the active player chooses from among four actions - Human Resources, Management, Construction, or Research and Development - and the selected action is the only action taken that turn for anyone.

This adds a lot of foresight and tension to the game, not only having to figure out what actions will benefit you most when it’s your turn to pick, but also trying to leave your company sufficiently diversified that you can take at least some benefit from whatever the other players might be prioritizing. It leads to a lot of moments of glancing across the table, trying to predict what a given player might be choosing once it's their turn, and if you can set yourself up to benefit if they do. Simultaneously that player might be looking at your board, noting your apparent guess, and go a completely different direction. Perhaps to their own detriment, but more to yours, shooting themselves in the foot with one hand to shoot you in the chest with the other.

All while another player keeps quiet, watching the competition eat each other.

All those interlacing systems and mechanics come together to create moments like this, and they are absolutely worth the time and investment. Carnegie is one of my favorite games of 2022, and has probably helped fully convert me to the theme of industrial expansion.

Endless Winter: Paleoamericans (2022)

Alright, enough of that robber baron crap. Let’s hunt sabertooth tigers.

Endless Winter is definitely more my traditional cup of thematic tea. Players take on the role of tribes around 10,000 BCE, developing their culture, expanding territory by establishing new villages, capturing (and sometimes harvesting) animals, and properly paying tribute to the idols.

Two of the core mechanisms behind Endless Winter are worker placement and deckbuilding, a combination that proved incredibly fun in Dune: Imperium (2020) and Lost Ruin of Arnak (2020). One thing that makes Endless Winter unique among them is the tightness of the actions available - there are only four, but with each having multiple stages. Each action has a top section you can perform as many times as you’d like, such as purchasing as many culture cards or animals as you can afford, leading to a middle section you perform only once, like paying the appropriate resources to claim a sacred stone or ‘tipping’ a single animal to harvest it for resources. The final section of any action is reserved for the first player to take the action, granting them a small additional benefit.

Not only is the game tight on actions, it’s also tight on rounds themselves. Games are surprisingly snappy for the weight and sheer amount of management involved, with only four individual rounds with which to manage your three workers. Though you’ll be heavily modifying each individual turn and eventually making as much use of the “infinite” sign as possible on how many times you can use the top side of an action, the game is swifter than you might expect.

I’ll keep my praise brief as (small spoiler) it appears to be making another appearance, but Endless Winter was a joy to play. Interlocking systems for scoring points, alongside the vast amount of culture cards, open up multiple avenues for scoring points while making certain you can’t completely ignore any actions. The game also comes with a fair few modules, some that probably warrant regular inclusion after your first play, but all offering variety and just a little extra depth if desired.

Alongside these modules are more involved expansions of which there appear (?) to be no less than three already. I’m a bit of a curmudgeon when it comes to Kickstarters featuring separate expansion content right out of the gate, but Endless Winter is one exception where I enjoy the base game enough to seek these out as further opportunities down the road. The combination of deckbuilding with deeper elements of area control or worker placement, and in this case both, appears to be a weave of mechanics I’ve a weakness for, and Endless Winter executes them perfectly. I’m eager to try the well-reviewed solo mode.

PART II : JESSICA

This year I really want to give a major shout out to those who played games with us. James and I weren’t able to play as many games together this year, but we got to play significantly more with our groups than ever before. Thank you for making time in your busy schedules. You know who you are. If your houses ever burn down, there’s a spot on the couch for you and your families. You’ll have to clear off the army men and Peppa Pig toys, but it’s there should you need it!

Another thing I want to mention this year is I’ll be adding a new section to mine: The Kids Corner. One game we played most with the kids and I’ll briefly run down why this game worked for us or why I think it’s important for their stage of development.

Without any further exposition!

Best “Easy” Game

Splendor Duel (2022)

James brought this home from the Parlor and I was dubious when he showed it to me. I already like Splendor. It plays fine at two players, why did they even make this? (Scoff. Teenage eye roll!)

But man am I glad they did. They successfully boiled down Splendor into what I like to call “airport games.” A game you can throw in your carryon and play to pass the time during a layover without significant impact on space.

They even boiled down the already succinct rules and twisted them ever so slightly. I’m not sure what we were ever crafting in the original but now we’re definitely crafting jewelry. I appreciate that now you can’t just grab any gem you need. You have to pick from the board three adjacent gems (not including a gold nugget). The addition of privilege scrolls, which allow you to, at any time, grab a single gem (not including a gold nugget), is a fabulous way to spoil whatever plans your opponent is crafting. It adds a whole new strategy to what was basically a solo game played with friends. It spurs interaction and some tension. Knowing that if I refill that board, I’m giving one of those privilege scrolls to my opponent. And I’m just mean enough to force James hand to use a scroll to take a gem that leaves him with no three gems adjacent, effectively spending a scroll to get a scroll.

I really was surprised how much I enjoyed this. The only thing I wish is that the chips had been upgraded to actual resin gems, but I wholeheartedly know why they didn’t. Without those chips, does it even feel like Splendor?

Best “Medium” Game

Honey Buzz (2020)

Apparently I’m a sucker for the cutesy games. Everdell? Love it. Meadow? I swoon for the art. Anything with cats? Yes plz! Honey bees selling their honey to the woodland creatures’ Farmers’ Market? Oh gawd! As per usual, Rodney did an amazing job explaining the game. See him for the tutorial.

Personally, the most difficult part of this game is the set up of your own hive. The first player has to match their hive to a configuration card in any combination they want so long as all the sides match. Then all the other players have to match their starting hives to look exactly like that. I don’t know why this simple spatial task is just so difficult for my brain, but I have to get up multiple times and walk around the table just to get my hive right. I look like a buffoon.

Oh there’s so much to love about this game! I love the beeples (incoherent girl squeal!!). I love the squishy nectar. I love the placement of bees to get a hex to add to your starting hive. It combines worker placement with an almost map-building aesthetic. It’ll make your ears smoke trying to get those hexes to fit just so to get the type of honey you want to make. Only when you complete a ring of hexes with an empty cell in the middle can you then activate the actions on your hexes. On the main board, there’s a nectar tiles where you can forage for nectar that you want to place into those empty cells. That’s how you’ll fill orders and maybe sell to the market, but that’ll devalue further sales!

When I first played this game, I really thought it was gonna just be cutesy and easy. My Saturday morning was gonna be blissfully filling orders for these little woodland creatures. They were going to be delighted and skip away and I would feel like a real queen bee. Then I realized half way through that I’m playing against James and he’s effectively only making one type of honey at a time and then tanking the bear market at every turn… If I don’t stop him he’ll end the game with the third devalued honey… And I’m not ready for this to be over because I haven’t finished my plan!

Long way ‘round of saying, it’s a delightful game. Adorable and so spot on with the theming. It’s very nearly perfect.

Best “Heavy” Game

Endless Winter: Paleoamericans (2022)

Full disclosure. I was only able to play three heavyweight games this year. Therefore my opinion should be prefaced with a grain of salt. James was able to eek out more of the nitty gritty games this year. 

As for Endless Winter, there is a lot going on with this game and the sheer breadth of choices will make even seasoned gamers stare paralyzed at the rule book. To this, I say, “jump in.” Otherwise, you’ll be studying the rule book all afternoon if you absolutely need to understand how it all fits together before you make your first move.

In essence, you’ll be using your two regular workers and one chieftain to claim spots on the main board. These spots let you do everything from add more tribesmen to your hand (yes your hand and not your discard!), to hunting for game, to seizing culture cards (which you should absolutely not ignore), to building settlements and villages on the map. Yup. There’s an area control aspect to this game. There’s an entire eclipse phase that lets you reap resources from the hexes that your villages straddle. There’s a monolith board that will grant you instant benefits and victory points. There’s an icon board that amplifies your burial cards (trashed cards) and exponentially deals points end game for your food and tools. There’s nearly a hundred ways to get victory points and most of them won’t be counted until the final scoring. At its core, it’s a card drafting game. That, more than anything else, is what cinched this one for me as the best Heavy. 

I’m sure there’s a parallel to the style of this game that blends card drafting, area control, influence control, set collection, and sheer point grabs, but the closest one I can think of is Dune Imperium. If you read our past favorites, you’ll know that Dune Imperium was my best of the best last year. So any game that gives me those vibes is gonna rank highly on my list. Probably forever.

That said, Dune Imperium and Endless Winter couldn’t be farther apart in theming. Both are pretty on point for the feel of what you’re doing. For the most part. I will say I thought there was going to be more winter weather aspect to this, just based on the name alone. But that game itself is so good that all is forgiven. Where Dune gave me the literal sweats over singular points, Endless Winter will have you plundering for mega point grabs and you won’t have any idea whose winning. For me that’s fab. I can’t patiently abide the min/max player, stuck in analysis paralysis of the sheer amount of choices. I just have things to do. I’m sorry.

My favorite aspect of the game is what admittedly won me the game. Hunting. Collecting apparently living animals, not killing them for their resources, makes me feel like a paleolithic vegan. Saving the other animals from the barbarous tribes that would use their bones for scrying or the stag for living in like a taunton. Seriously. When you kill a stag in this game, you get to put down a settlement and get four meat. Eating our way from the inside out, come on in kids, the stag is still warm!

Kids Corner

For those of you who didn’t know, James and I have two children: a preschooler and a toddler. They’re both beautiful souls in their own way, but until this summer I didn’t believe either of them were ready for any sort of board game. I knew going in that would be a trial in patience (for all of us) and would require emotional wrangling. At their stage of development, my only goals were to have an enjoyable experience for all and gain some mastery of this only: turn taking. That’s it. There’s no winners or losers. It’s an exercise in patience. Let’s learn to play together. The best game we found to accomplish this is:

Don’t Break the Ice (2017)

In my research of this game I was shocked to learn that this game was originally published in 1968. The only difference is a polar bear in the middle and not a penguin. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. Sometimes the old ones are the best ones. There’s nothing to build upon when the goal is so purely distilled.

This game teaches the most boiled down, direct cause and effect for little kids. Sure there’s strategy. But only if your goal is to actually win by NOT letting the penguin fall. In the Parsons’ house, we don’t play that way. Winning and losing is a concept that I have no desire to add to the mix yet. We practice taking turns with the hammer. We patiently wait until one of us is able to knock down some blocks–for our two year old this takes several swings because she is just such a gentle soul–and we exclaim loudly when the penguin falls.

We play this game three to four rounds and then put it away. Any more than that and I personally have trouble keeping one or both of them on task. We practice saying, “Mommy’s turn” or “Daddy’s turn” and politely (and gently!) handing over the hammer.

I have my own obnoxious theories about how important I think this one skill is for little kids and how we all could use an exercise in patience. But at the end of the day, what I want them to teach them is that we can have fun. All of us. Together. Participating equally. If we’re willing to be a little patient with each other.

Best of the Best

Bureau of Investigation: Investigations in Arkham & Elsewhere (2022)

This is the game where we really need to thank our regular playgroup. We are still working our way through this game and have every intention to finish it. Oh man this game has been so much fun. James and I played the first scenario together just as ourselves and it wasn’t nearly as fun as it was with the four of us. We were both very tired that day and we just couldn’t think through the sludge of our poor night’s sleep and we ended up bungling the whole first mission so badly we just pretty much handed ourselves over to the Cthulhu cultists with bows on our heads. 

Anecdote over. 

Why do I love this game? For starters, I’m a huge sucker for a Lovecraftian setting. From Mansions of Madness to Arkham Horror the Card Game, Fantasy Flight’s LCG, I love this genre. Monsters. Murders. Phallic statues gone missing? Jinkies! Every time I play one of these Lovecraftian games, I feel like the Gang from Scooby Doo just rolling in and looking for the bad guys in masks. Maybe that’s just me because I’m an awful investigator. I’m all too willing to run headlong into danger and not think twice about knocking on someone’s door who might be less than pleased to see me.

Secondly, the extras. The maps and newspapers, directory, and the case book. It is so well put together and easy to follow.. 

Thirdly, without spoiling anything I love the time limit. At the start of each scenario, you’re given the number of leads you can follow until you’re done. The end. No more! You have to then identify three locations to send in the FBI cavalry. The points that you earn at the end are indicative of how correctly you followed the clues. Were you and the cavalry consumed by the darkness? Did you find at least one of the ne’er do wells? Or is Mr. Hoover about to give you a serious promotion?

Putting a lead limit forces the investigators to light a fire. Figure it out. We can only go investigate one more place or interview one more person. It really likens to the far field, weird-that-you-would-even-consider-that-lead, theory. James will convince you to talk to some random red head that was mentioned at the literal beginning of the investigation, in passing! The time limit adds drama and frankly allows you to just wing it. It’s okay. You don’t need to set this aside to figure it out in the morning. Because we all know that when morning comes…You won’t want to.

That little bit of grace just… man I just needed it this year. I needed someone to tell me “do the best you can.” At worst… I mean… being a thrall is probably painless right?

PART III : DISCORD COMMUNITY

In 2019 we started a Discord channel, and it’s grown to over two hundred gamers near and far all chatting daily on a variety of topics, especially games! We thought it would be fun to ask what everyone else’s favorite games were this year. Here are some of the results.

“Over the past year I started playing turn-based board games frequently on BoardGameArena.com (BGA). I had an initial goal to play through every game at least once, which is becoming increasingly challenging as they continue to add games at a rapid clip.  As of now, I have played 564 games, most of them new to me.  I have found a number of surprise likes (Ultimate Railroads, The Crew, Downforce, Luxor, Butterfly, Nidavellir) and a handful that I have bought to play with family and friends (Azul, Cloud City, Barenpark, Happy City, Point Salad, L.L.A.M.A.). My favorite multiplayer BGA game remains The Castles of Burgundy, while for two players, it is 7 Wonders Duel.”

-Tricen

“Dinosaur Island: Rawr ‘n Write might be my favorite roll and write game. Just like it’s big sister, Dinosaur Island, you compete against your friends to build the best dinosaur theme park with real dinosaurs. This is a dice drafting game and worker placement game, where the dice you draft are your workers. Players have to make the most exciting attractions while also mitigating risk and danger to your employees and patrons.

This makes it to the top of my list for several reasons. Roll and Write games tend to have low player interaction, everyone making the best decision based on the same information, and usually take a very short time to play. Dinosaur Island: Rawr ‘n Write felt like a more full and complete board game experience than most games in the roll and write genre. I’m very eager to get this to the table again.”

- FrozenPeach

Splendor Duel (2022)

“Spendor Duel is a great twist on the familiar game. Unlike most of the games that have been given the Duel treatment, you CAN play regular Splendor with two players, but once you've played Duel, you probably won't want to. A neat twist on picking gems has you picking lines of them off a random array and managing the array makes this a significantly thinkier game than the original. Add some new abilities to the purchased cards, a new gem type (pearls) needed to buy many of the better cards and a few other twists and you have what is easily my pick for most compelling new release.”

-Leons1701

As we move into 2023 there’s a handful of games on our horizon that we’d like to try - our Kickstarter copies of Frosthaven, Darwin’s Journey, Dune: War for Arrakis, Skyrise, the DIE Role Playing Game, in addition to a number of games that have been out for a while that we’ve not gotten to dive into yet. More than anything though, we’re looking forward to watching more people make friends and have fun over laughs, strategy, and fun. We’re looking forward to seeing you all in the new year.